you're in the wind, i'm in the water

nobody's son, nobody's daughter

i’ve been feeling like someone who exists outside their body except i can’t find my way back. i feel like a woman who doesn’t know where she can exist in truth or where she even belongs. my skin feels too taut, my face feels swollen and unfamiliar, i wake up in the middle of the night with sweat behind my knees and my chest damp and sticky. i feel sick. i feel ill. the kind of sick that leaves you feeling like your brain is on fire, a vast treacherous emptiness that swallows you whole into a black nothingness where there is no light, there is no joy, there is no way out. i want something. i desperately need something. but i can’t figure out what i need to feel better so i lie down and wait for the hours to pass, my heart palpitating and aching all at once.

i text my mom and tell her i’m struggling and i am finding myself wanting to get fucked up. i tell her i feel an urge to get drunk but i won’t. i tell her i want to, but i won’t. i buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store and it stays on my counter, almost tempting me to give in. i feel an inexplicable, fucked up urge to be reckless and harmful to myself to self soothe. i don’t tell her that i am fantasizing again. it is an old fantasy. one that has been with me since this all started several years ago. it’s a fantasy that i return to when i am feeling hopeless and so full of despair that it almost feels like a beacon, a dangerous mirage that feels like it is guiding me when i can’t see my way out of anything. i am fantasizing about being on the highest floor of a parking garage, teetering off the ledge with one foot until suddenly, i’m not.

i emailed my psychiatrist, a quiet gentle man who speaks with an accent that is lyrical and soothing, two nights ago at one in the morning pleading for a last minute appointment. i feel so mentally unwell, i wrote him, i’m sick and i don’t know why this is happening and i think my medication isn’t working anymore and i’m scared. i pause. i write, i’m having ideations again but no plan, no intent. he knows what my ideations mean. but i don’t tell him that i found myself silently sobbing in the middle of whole foods and i found it almost impossible to stop. i don’t tell him that i’ve been sleeping until 2 pm on my days off. i don’t tell him that i don’t have the willpower to wash my sweat stained bed sheets or take out my trash. i don’t tell him that i feel like i am floating outside of my body. i don’t tell him how heavy my heart feels, how i can feel it physically aching in my chest and how the ache radiates to every part of my body and how it feels so unbearable that if i could, i would tear it out of my chest with my own hands because that is how burdensome it is. i don’t tell him that the hopelessness sits in the pit of my stomach and it’s pangs have become what dictate what i’m able to do that day. i don’t tell him that my brain feels so cloudy, how hard it feels to formulate thoughts and sentences and to finds words that make sense together. i don’t tell him that all i can really do to feel any bit of calm is to sit on my fire escape and wait for time to pass with each lighting of my cigarette.

i haven’t felt like this since several years ago, before i started prozac. the last time i felt this unwell was when jeremy took me for a drive to help me feel better but nothing was helping. the windy roads and the podcast blaring through his speakers made me feel carsick and irrationally filled with rage. i sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window and silently crying until i finally managed to ask him, almost in a pant, if we could just please go home. when we got home, i curled into a ball on the bed and with tears and snot smeared all over my face, i told him i wanted to die. he told me not to say that and those feelings were dramatic and not real. but they were real to me. as i laid crying on the bed, not understanding how he couldn’t see that i was in pain, the idea of floating off a parking garage was the only thing that made me feel calm. i’ve always been prone to melancholy but this was different. this felt deeper and insidious. this felt malignant, spreading to every part of my brain, from my fingertips to my toes. so there’s where i go. i go to a place where it’s easier to imagine a place where i don’t exist. floating in a free fall.

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this isn’t about love.

this isn’t about loneliness.

this isn’t about a lacking of.

this is about me.

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i’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately which is rare for me. a couple weeks ago, i walked down the staircase of my apartment building and smelled the lingering scent of a cologne that was so similar to the one he wore when i was a child that it stopped me in my tracks. i couldn’t help but stand there for a second and take a deep inhale. in that one deep breath, it was my childhood. it was him.

i remember being fifteen or sixteen and sitting in the backseat of his car. the windows were down and the wind whipped my hair around my face. we caught eyes in his rearview mirror. over the sharp whistling of the wind, i could hear him tell me that men cheat. that’s what men do. my husband will cheat on me, too.

teenage girl me didn’t believe him but older me did. older me took his words as a premonition, a warning, a curse, a promise.

i was always scared of that monster. the monster of infidelity. it loomed over me in my relationships, it felt like the curse of my dad’s words were hiding in the cracks of the foundation waiting to seep out and dig it’s claws into what i had given myself to.

but what happens when you’re the monster? after all, i am my father’s daughter.

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ethan texts in the family chat that i need some perspective, that i just got out of a 5 year relationship to someone i was engaged to and thought i would be together with forever - and now, my life has completely changed.

he says this like it is an explanation for my depression.

but like i said.

this isn’t about love.

this isn’t about loneliness.

it isn’t about a lacking of.

it’s about me and what i am not.

it’s about the seeping between the cracks.